How I Spent My Summer

True to the great indoorsman that I am July and August were spent inside. Not just my usual laying on the couch reading, poking around the kitchen, dithering self...no this time I was inside for a purpose or a reason anyway...I was getting to know the video editing program Final Cut Pro a little better.

My goal was to shoot videos for Portland Farmers Market. My first installment, Wag Eggs, is a reminder that we are incredibly sophisticated media consumers. Watch a season of the Wire or Mad Men and you know story, editing, sound design better than the most hard core movie enthusiast from 50 years ago. Take that viewing acumen, which you'd think would be a bonus, then try to make your own short film and you quickly realize the difference between doing and watching. It's harder than it looks even with a supportive and knowledgeable instructor and super-fast equipment.





The other short was a student film in which I play a charcter named Douchebag. Student Film, Douchebag, enough said:

Locally In Season: Sweet Onions

Ready for your Cliffy Claven fact of the day? Sweet Onions actually have less natural sugar in them than regular brown onions. What! Sweet onions are 8% sugar compared to the 12%, than what consumers call brown onions, but are usually grown, traded and sold as storage onions.

There are 4 factors in making an onion sweet: variety, soil, water content and growing temperature. Most sweet onions, wherever they are grown come from a Grano/Granex variety, for Vidalia’s there are 17 approved strains that can be grown, the sweet onion exception is Walla-Walla (more on that in a moment). Climate, micro-climate and soil conditions are always a factor in growing, the French concept of terrior does the best job of explaining this phenomena: The soils in  sweet onions fields are low in sulfur compounds, the low sulfur characteristic gives the onion its namesake sweetness. What little sulfur can be found is watered down - when comparing to storage onions, you’ll often hear people drop the adjective ‘juicy’ to describe the profile of a sweet onion. It is true and accurate; also worth noting, the strongest onions have the least water stored in their root.

Another paradox of sweet onions is they are associated with warm weather, Vidalia, Maui, Texas’ Sunbrero or the high desert fields of the Walla-Walla, yet cooler weather produces milder flavors. The answer to this paradox is most sweet onion seeds are sewn in the fall, slowly growing in the cool months netting a milder flavor.

Closer to home, Pacific Northwesterners have Walla-Walla onions. Geographically, Walla-Wallas have many of the attributes needed for sweet onions - located on the dry side of the Cascades in what would normally be a very dry climate, Walla-Walla onions are grown in region that has access to irrigation from river flow and benefits from ample snow pack. Unlike other sweet onions, our local variation comes from a different strain of seed than the Granex. In the late 1800s, a French soldier, Peter Pieri, brought a strain of onions from Corsica and introduced the varietal to the veg loving Italian farmers in the region - The birth of multi-culturalism in the Columbia basin or progenitor of fusion cooking? Selective plantings and adaptation to local growing conditions have produced our own branded sweet onion, whose season, like our summers, starts and stays a little late.

The fact of the matter, a Walla-Walla or Vidalia Onion could be grown in Iowa if not for the treat of a lawsuit. Vidalia’s were one of the first branded agricultural products in the US, eventually receiving State designation and Federal recognition in the 80s. Vidalia’s have transformed from the byproduct of a warm climate, first-to-market, spring crop into a premium agricultural product available 9 months a year. This was accomplished by use of aggressive marketing and Controlled Atmosphere (CA) technology, the same kind of low oxygen environment used to prolong the life of apples and pears.

So while Vidalia’s are a nice but extending the brand and season have diluted the quality.  Walla-Walla’s are better (seasonal/local), but I am not brand loyal. Give me the sweet onion that came out of the ground yesterday, a stick of butter and some chèvre and two hours and we can all enjoy a sweet onion tart.

The Chicken the Layed the Infected Egg

As the issue about the dangers of raw milk came up on this blog last week, the US was just beginning the largest egg recall in the nation’s history.  About 500,000,000 eggs (about 41.5 million dozen) that have been sold since mid-May are being recalled do to exposure or possible exposure to salmonella. The Center for Disease Control (CDC), which depending on your perspective, either is cautious in its published findings or under-reports cases, have confirmed over 30 cases linked to this salmonella outbreak. Keep in mind, not everyone who suffers from food born illness will report symptoms or seek medical attention and not all health officials who treat patients will follow up with the confusing mix of county, state and federal disease trackers - Estimates that place the number of affected people at 1200-1500 are reasonable. 

At the center of the recall is the quaintly named Wright County Eggs, headquarted in Galt, Iowa. Wright County (and a second producer linked to this outbreak, Hillandale in Minnesota) package eggs under the Lucerne, Albertson, Mountain Dairy, Ralph's, Boomsma's, Sunshine, Hillandale, Trafficanda, Farm Fresh, Shoreland, Lund, Dutch Farms and Kemp labels. Wright County’s management have clashed with regulators over hiring illegal immigrants, housing immigrants, environmental & safety violations, creating an atmosphere in which rape and sexual harassment were allowed – and they have lost, racking up millions of dollars in fines.

The response to a crisis is important: Odwalla and Jack in the Box are 2 examples of owning the narrative in the face of horrible news. On the opposite in end of the spectrum, Wright County Egg owner, Jack DeCoster, is unavailable for comment and the industry group the Egg Safety Center has issued a press release stressing how rare salmonella is in eggs. And as is the wont of industry trade groups, they push the blame back on consumers by reminding people to cook, handle and store their eggs properly. Both organizations have pointed out this recall is voluntary. If I were involved in managing this response the words and phrases: safety, health, family, corporate responsibility, care, concern, precaution, concern for our customers wouldn’t just be choice prose used to reassure the public, they would be the ideals driving the response. 

Annually 5,000 people in the US perish via food poisoning, one estimate places 30 of those fatalities directly on eggs. In this outbreak, the culprit is Salmonella enteritidis, you can get the squeemy details here. With eggs, the bacteria is passed through the infected hens into her eggs. Both the chicken and the egg will appear normal making it hard to detect diseased eggs.

As mentioned in our previous post, small growers, farmers and producers are not immune to outbreaks, but the difference is in the scale. An operation selling 600 eggs a week is going to have a smaller impact than Wright County, whose operation was governed by the new federal regulations for producers that house over 50,000 birds. One stretches a few zipcodes, the other reaches 22 states. The consolidation of food production into the hands of a few major producers doesn’t cause disease, outbreaks or bacteria but boy does it amplify it.

The Milkman Commeth

In response to my closing paragraph in Busy, like a Fox – a reader left this comment: Who you calling rickety? I promise you - "under the radar" milk makers are scrupulous about their sanitization. They HAVE to be. Of course there is always a margin for human error, but where is your data to back up being so dismissive of small outfits? I want numbers.

In January of this year 5 people became sick with  Campylobacter infections after drinking raw milk in New York. In March, same pathogen different state, 17 were made ill after drinking raw milk. Earlier this summer, at least 3 people were sickened by drinking E. coli tainted raw milk in Minnesota, one victim, a child, has racked up a half million dollars in medical bills. To date, in 2010 there have been 9 separate confirmed food poisoning outbreaks linked to raw milk. Since they began tracking data, CDC has confirmed well over 100 outbreaks of food borne illness related to raw milk: 70% of all illnesses involving dairy involve raw milk, while only 1% (possibly up to 3%) of all dairy consumed is raw.

In 2005, 80 people were sickened in the NW from E. coli traced to a small parsley grower in Oregon. In 2008 over a dozen people were infected by tainted spinach from a small farm. Oregon, senior epidemiologist, William Keene - "There are no data to suggest that small farms or food processors are any less risky than big ones."

People should have raw milk if they want raw milk. Part of the problem in keeping an activity illegal is that it invites a level of unscrupulousness and a lack of accountability. What adults do is really their own concern - The belief that industrial food is evil and make the reactionary choice to head in the opposite direction is understandable but worrisome. Especially when you give raw milk to children, especially young children with smaller bodies and underdeveloped immune systems.

In 1996, Odwalla, then a medium sized, regional maker of ‘natural’ juices shipped bacteria laced bottles that resulted in 70 cases of food poisoning and the death of one child; a child who according to reports was given unfiltered, unpasteurized juice because it was considered healthy. The company’s reaction to the outbreak is studied in business schools as the exemplar of Crisis Response…And while voluntary recalls, paying all medical bills and switching to flash pasteurization might have all been appropriate actions, Odwalla was eventually fined 1.5 million dollars for wrong doing (Government, not civil actions) and they possibly knew about harmful bacteria in their products since the 80s.

As someone who thinks ultra pasteurized cream tastes scorched and milk from plastic containers tastes chemical while raw milk cheeses have been some of the tastiest I have ever had, I like the availability of raw milk. As far as health claims go - this isn’t a rational discussion where risks are weighed against benefits, if it was be no one would feed raw milk to a child. This is an emotional argument...A person isn't going to scientifically prove raw milk prevents autism, but at some point, whether the milk comes from a rickety, fly by night dairy or above board, modern and streamlined raw milk distribution center -someone is going to get sick and die from drinking raw milk, just as people occasionally perish from eating my beloved raw cheese. Proceed with caution.